After obsessively watching some of the twitch plays pokemon stream I was inspired to play some Pokemon again. To play Pokemon on Ubuntu there are only a few steps you have to follow:

Install Visual Boy Advance Express. visualboyadvance is one of the main Gameboy advance emulators for Ubuntu. Express is the visual configuration frontend you can use to customize your experience. To install it, simply enter the following command in your terminal:sudo apt-get install vbaexpress

Get the ROM for Pokemon version you want to play. To play Pokemon using an emulator you need a ROM for the game, which is just an image of the actual game. There hundreds of sites that host Pokemon ROMs (and others) like Loveroms. The pages for these sites come and go due to takedown requests/copyright claims so linking them here is not very useful.

Start VBA. You can do this either through the VBA express app icon or by entering the following command in your terminal:vbaexpress

Switch to 128k save type (blank white screen). A lot of people have reported that starting the rom will result in a blank white screen. The fix to this seems to be changing your save type to 128k under (options>emulator>save type>flash 128k)

Press Play, and load the GBA ROM you downloaded. The ROM file should have the extension .gba

That’s it! You’ve just followed the absolute basic steps needed to play Pokemon on Ubuntu. Since the documentation seems to be pretty sparse for vbaexpress here are some essential default controls:

If you’ve followed the above steps and are still having issues running Pokemon on Ubuntu, please post in the comments below. To increase your chances of a solution being found include as much detail as possible (which version of the game you’re running, what operating system you have, what video card you have and steps to reproduce the issue). Screenshots are also very useful!

The .gba should be included in the .zip file you downloaded. Either double click on it to open it and extract the .gba file OR from terminal, navigate to the directory containing the .zip file and run unzip filename.zip

I actually use the much better VBA-M GTK fork of Visual Boy Advance on any Linux Distro. (Currently Ubuntu 14.04); Installed from an Debian Package, I downloaded from the Official SourceForge page.
“vbam-gtk_1.8.0.1001-1_i386.deb”, It works way much Better than the Original VBA, and VBAExpress is just an Graphical Frontend. I also use VBA-M on Windows, Best GBA Emulator around!

VBA-M Is the Best GBA Emulator; It’s a Fork of the Discontinued VBA project, Works Flawlessly on Windows and Linux Ubuntu, With every Game too. And No need to Install Graphical Frontends, like VBAExpress, I highly recommend the GTK version on Ubuntu 14.04. VBA-M supports: Cheats, Screenshots, AVI Video Recording, and Much more Built-In to the Emulator!

I am trying to get Pokémon Ruby to work. It starts, but when I’m at the scene where I start my game, nothing happens! I am using Linux 14.04 maybe… Sorry if you didn’t understand my problem… I am very bad at English….

On Ubuntu I got the same white screen problem. I made a huge facepalm when I figured out the problem. I downloaded a rom name smthg like: 1695 – Pokemon – smthing smthing. I removed the numbers, and the whitespaces, so I renamed it to pokemon_firered.gba and it worked. Maybe Ubuntu still don’t like whitespaces and stuff in filenames. Good penguin *pets on head*. It worked for me, I hope it works for you too.

When I try to start Pokemon a window open. I get a white screen with a black cadre.
At the left bottom a percent display shows numbers between 90% and 110%.
But the game dont start. I already tried to download another pokemon version but the same problem.